Journalist/biographer on campus Monday for reading

November 22, 2013 at 8:01 am

Journalist and biographer Cathleen Miller will be on campus Monday (Nov. 25) to read from and discuss her latest book,Champion of Choice, a biography of Nafis Sadik, a Pakistani national and one of the highest ranking women in the United Nations. Sadik is recognized as a world leader in women's reproductive health and family planning. Miller’s reading is Monday at 7 p.m. in the WAC South Lounge.

Miller travelled around the globe researching this book, charting the influence of Sadik's initiatives, often finding herself in harm's way to get the story. When Sadik, an obstetrician, took a post at the fledgling United Nations Population Fund the year was 1971 and the average global birth rate equaled six children per mother. By the time of her retirement in 2000, the average birth rate had been cut in half. Her strategy grew out of decades of research and conferring with some of the great minds of our time to form a groundbreaking new approach: provide females with education and the tools to control their own fertility, and the rate of population growth would shrink radically.

Miller is also the author ofDesert Flower,the best-selling biography of Waris Dirie, the Somali refugee who underwent genital mutilation as a child and later became a supermodel, actress, and UN human rights activist.